...Some universities — and, in particularly, some humanities departments — have, over the last few decades, wandered far from the primary purpose of what these institutions were designed for: to teach what is worth knowing; to train the intellect; to acquaint students with, and help them appreciate, the glories of the human mind and its finest achievements.

Concomitantly, they have descended into pseudo-studies, become infatuated with low pop culture, become obsessed with faddish social justice issues, turned hypervigilant on their students’ “comfort levels” and are pruriently concerned with sexism narratives, cause politics and “identity” zealotry. They bear almost no resemblance to the institutions of higher learning — higher in its full applications — that they, at least ideally, have always aspired to be.

...It seems some part of our system for producing intellectually responsible grownups has failed Johnstone. That failure is probably not to be found in the extensive education in social work. A degree in social work amounts to a degree in helping people: assuming it is not totally idiotic for our institutions of higher learning to be generating such paper, there must be mastery of some technical arcana involved. I do not know that this would involve instruction in the details of the Holocaust. A nursing education doesn’t; an engineering education doesn’t.It is, rather, that “social justice and peace studies” business that captures my eye. Wouldn’t the matter, the essential grounding of an education in social justice and peace just be … history? (With particular attention to the topic of concentration camps?) Wouldn’t expertise of this kind require digestion of a mass of information about the flux of war, diplomacy, economies, and ideas? Something Studies items were on the menu already when I began my undergraduate education, and I majored in history partly because, in my innocence, I couldn’t see how you would study anything else about human affairs without that foundation.But we all know the secret of Something Studies well enough now: it is a way of avoiding the rigour and complexity of a history education, and going straight to the business of striking political stances. It is History For Left-Wing Dummies. And when you see such a degree on someone’s CV, you can be quite sure you have found one...

Saturday, September 26, 2015

An RAF airman was moved out of a hospital waiting room because staff feared his uniform may "upset" other patients, it has been reported.

According to the Sun, aircraft engineer Mark Prendeville, was taken to A&E at Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, Kent, after chemicals from a fire extinguisher got in to his eyes during a training exercise.

The 38-year-old, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was taken to an empty corner of the waiting room before being moved behind a corner by hospital staff, the newspaper said.

It has a leader who is sympathetic to Israel as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

But in that view, Thomas Mulcair stands virtually alone in his party. Almost all the rest of his caucus don't like Jews at all.

Of course this isn't the 1930's where you can just come out and say that you detest Jews and get away with it, particularly when you're pretending to be the "social justice" party.

So what they do is go after the only Jewish state in the world and apply standards to it that they don't apply to any other country. Canada is a country that was a colonial project of England and France, its land conquered from the First Nations. So while Canadian Jew-haters sometimes pay lip service to Native rights, they try to push a boycott of Israel for its "colonialism." That's despite the fact that Jews have been indigenous to Israel or whatever name that place took for the last 2600 years.

Thomas Mulcair has said of the boycott that his MP Cash endorses, "...to say that you’re personally in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions for the only democracy in the Middle East is, as far as I’m concerned, grossly unacceptable. "

It's unlikely Mulcair will take Cash to the woodshed over his endorsement of an effort to crush the Jewish state. Cash is a high-profile, sitting MP and Mulcair isn't going to dump one of those over a few offended Jews in a safe NDP riding just four weeks before the election.

But this sort of thing is an epidemic among NDP candidates.

An NDP candidate in Hamilton, Ontario, who is a School Board Vice-Chair and has a degree in "Social Justice" Studies made vulgar jokes about a Nazi death camp for Jews and tried to brush it away by claiming she "never heard of Auschwitz."

A number of other NDPs have been forced out by Mulcair after they expressed support for the same antisemitic boycott that Cash just endorsed, or made comments about Israel that bordered on the deranged. But many NDP MPs and candidates remain who still do so, and have even tacitly endorsed anti-Israel terrorist organizations.

This is the reality behind the smiling face that Tom Mulcair is trying to project to Canadians leading up to October's election date. The smile on Mulcair's face may actually be a pained grimace reflecting his fear of the next imbecilic statement that will inevitably come from one of his candidates.

...Schiefke was a board member for the Climate Reality Project, an American group that virulently opposes Keystone XL, and generally the Alberta oil sands altogether.

Schiefke clearly takes those values to heart. In a April 2014 interview, he argued the government should force the Alberta “tar sands” to subsidize Quebec and Ontario because…well just because.

What I would like to see is the federal government come up with a plan that no longer tries to expand on the tar sands, and instead uses a significant proportion of the revenues generated from the tar sands to invest specifically in renewable energies produced in Ontario and Quebec.

The City of Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre hosted the 2015 annual conference of an extremist group that calls upon Muslims not to vote, advocates the execution of anyone who leaves Islam and supports a global caliphate. An audio tape recorded at the meeting reveals the content of the presentation.

The group also says that jihad is a duty and it should be commenced even if the enemy does not attack. A Canadian leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Canada, who calls all Canadian soldiers war criminals, has told Canadian Muslims it is Haram (forbidden) to vote in elections because Muslims can only vote for leaders who support Sharia Law.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

In statements, three Iranian leaders – President Hassan Rohani, Foreign Minister Zarif, and Deputy Foreign Minister and senior negotiator Abbas Araghchi – emphasized that Iran has no intention of abiding by UNSRC 2231, which includes the JCPOA and another element; rather, that they will abide only by the original JCPOA.

The Iran nuclear deal consists of the following:

A. A set of understandings between Iran and the P5+1 powers (as well as the remaining disagreements) all in a single package called the JCPOA. It is not a contract between Iran and the P5+1 countries as a group or any single one of them, and hence no document was signed.

B. This set of mutual understandings (as well as disagreements) packaged in the JCPOA was transferred, following the conclusion of negotiations in Vienna on July 14, 2015, to the UN Security Council, for endorsement as a UN Security Council resolution. The resolution, UNSCR 2231, was passed on July 25, 2015 and it includes, in addition to the JCPOA, another element (Annex B) with further stipulations regarding Iran. For example, it addresses the sanctions on Iran's missile development project.

To understand why UNSCR 2231 is structured in this way, we can look at statements by top Iranian negotiators about the process that led up to it:

In a July 20, 2015 interview on Iranian Channel 2, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and senior negotiator Abbas Araghchi said that there had been tough bargaining between the Iranian and American delegations over the issue of the arms embargo on Iran and the sanctions related to Iran's missile development project. "The Americans sought their inclusion in the JCPOA, claiming that otherwise they could not face criticism from Arab countries in the region. When they said that they could not lift the sanctions altogether, we told them explicitly that in that case there is no agreement. We told them that the national security issues are non-negotiable and that we will not accept an agreement which continues the embargo on weapons and the sanctions on missile development. In the end, the Americans said, We will put the issue of the embargo and the missiles in the UN Security Council Resolution separate from the agreement."

For most voters, it's Issue Number One, and this week both Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau inadvertently have assured Canada's voters that the economy will take a major downturn if the Conservative are not reelected with a majority.

The Opposition and Third Party Leader accomplished that by definitively stating that they would not support a Conservative minority government. What that definitively means is if Stephen Harper doesn't get another majority, then either Thomas Mulcair and his gang of incompetents or Justin "Not Up To The Job" Trudeau will be heading a coalition government.

It also turns out that despite opposition from the media's chattering classes and the opposition parties, there are some controversies that have strengthened the Conservatives' appeal. Issues like requiring new citizens to reveal their faces at swearing-in ceremonies, and a go-slow approach to taking in refugees from parts of the world fraught with violent extreme ideologies are strongly favoring the Conservatives among voters.

With less than a month left in the election and the Conservatives' war chest being far greater than its two major rivals, they are well poised to pull even further from the rest of the pack by voting day.

Johnstone is been Vice-Chair of the Hamilton-Wentworth School Board and has been a school Trustee for the last five years. By any measure of decency, Johnstone's comments were exponentially worse than those of Conservative candidate Gordon Giesbrecht. But more troublesome is how such a tremendous ignoramus as Johnstone could have been in a position of authgority over a major school board.
Troublesome but not surprising, since she is indicative of the NDP's modus operandi. They NDP uses municipal politics the way baseball teams use farm clubs. But with a difference. The NDP stacks the deck in their municipal candidates' favor, often with illegal or dodgy campaign spending and by busing in paid union operatives to work for whoever the NDP wants in office.

Once in as a local candidate with some name-recognition, the NDP will, at the earliest opportunity, try to move them up to the provincial or federal level.

But the quality of these candidates is typically abysmal. Many of them are evident imbeciles, like Alex Johnstone, histrionic fanatics like Hugo Chavez groupie Linda McQuaig, or borderline anti-Semites. It's one of the reasons the NDP didn't want a long election campaign; so that the utter incompetence of their candidate slate might stand a better chance of not coming to light.

Monday, September 21, 2015

While not formally calling it the "Death to Israel Lecture Series," the point of them is pretty clear.

It turns out this planned lecture at U of Toronto's Anthropology Department is postponed, so fanatical anti-Semites and crazed anti-western academic imbeciles will have to satisfy their lust in other ways that afternoon.

You'll note that for them "Israeli colonialism" is postulated. On behalf of whom Israel is "colonizing" should make for an interesting question. A better one still is how people who were indigenous to a place for the last 2800 years, and whose culture predates the Islamic one there by more than a millennium are "colonizers."

Prof. Amahl Bishara (Tufts University)Varieties of Colonialism and The Politics of Fracture:
Protesting the Gaza War in Israel and the West Bank Anthropology Colloquium
Series 2:00-4:00pm, AP 246, 19 Russell St.

Political systems and physical space establish the
conditions of possibility for political expression within and between two
Palestinian communities: Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians of the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, two groups differently subaltern in relation to
Israeli colonialism.During the 2014 Gaza War, both groups protested in
solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Ethnographic research at both of these
sites demonstrates that, even though these different protests drew on and
celebrated the same political culture, forms of protest diverged. In Israel,
protesters chanted nationalist slogans at permitted protests guarded by Israeli
police. In the West Bank, demonstrators focused on direct confrontation with
Israeli soldiers. This paper argues that we must attend to how different kinds
of subalterneity can exist in a single political system, even when groups share
elements of culture and history, and how these differences can inhibit both
dialogue and collective expression. I argue that by deploying legal, cultural,
and military forms of domination differently across various environments,
states cultivate distinct communicative regimes even within a single sovereign
space or political system. The variations within systems may be critical to a
system’s durability.

...Was the clock meant to look like a bomb? Was it Islamophobic to ask why it looked the way it looked? — leaped the cranks, the conspiracy theorists, the hashtaggers and the anti-hashtaggers. Sure, the clock had been seized by authorities — but why were there no images of it functioning? Why had no teacher offered a second-by-second account of how what seemed like a non-event so quickly resulted in Ahmed’s arrest? And why was his father always running for president of Sudan?...

The Leap Manifesto unveiled by Naomi Klein and a coalition of somewhat kindred spirits this week in Toronto illustrates the phenomenon of regrouping in which the shattered Old Left, heavily buffeted eco-zealots, imperishable agitators for the native people, and the detritus of organized labour, together with an endearing rag-tail of old do-gooders, posturers and hemophiliac bleeding hearts have stood on each other’s shoulders and proclaimed once more that they are the wave of the future.

The inspiriting tocsin for this bedraggled resurrection, which if any of it actually occurs will be the greatest comeback since Lazarus, seems to have been Naomi Klein’s book last year, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Her organizing principle is that ecological necessities have made much of commerce, and especially the carbon-based economy, obsolete and unsustainable.

The bone-crushing defeat of international communism — the metamorphosis of China into a pure-capitalist/command-economy hybrid and of the Russian core of the old Soviet Union into a gangster state run by avaricious and cynical friends of the regime — has forced the traditional Marxists of the West to engage in frenetic networking and consensus-building. They have made their big move toward the environment zealots.

These, too, have taken their lumps, as Dr. Michael Mann’s renowned hockey stick has been exposed as an infamous fraud, and the whole marching juggernaut of global warming alarmists has been reduced to tired knots of dissidents, like hung-over New Year revellers, still blowing the odd noise-maker about the much-diluted concept of climate change. From the butterfly collectors and bird-watchers through all the shadings of the environmental movement to the anti-carbon militants, a joint command structure seems to have been rallied by Klein’s fervent improvisation that the evils of carbon-sourced energy will drive a revulsion against capitalism, and the left, guided by her essentially Marxist roadmap, will snatch victory from the obese stomach of the bovine capitalist monster...

Toronto Star reporter with security guards who were sent to chuck me out of the 'Muslim Debate' last night that was held at the Aga Khan Centre in Toronto.

The proceedings had taken a break at the time for the audience to pray in the middle of the debate when the Toronto Star reporter came with these guards as I sat in the media section, doing absolutely nothing other than tweeting that the two moderators were biased and did not even attempt to disguise their contempt for PM Harper and to corner the Conservative candidate, Karim Jivraj.

They wouldn't say why they wanted me to leave, and then threatened to call the cops, but the picked on the wrong guy.

Suffice to say, the charade of the 'debate' re-started after the pious bearded and hijabis had prayed and come back.

I was later told that I had taken a picture of the Toronto Star reporter and that she was protesting. Fact is I did not take any picture of that woman nor did I know where she was sitting or who she was, never having met her.

Had it not been for a dozen witnesses who backed my story, I am sure I would have been dragged out.

This incident is just a glimpse into the authoritarian and supremacist view of the Islamist that unfortunately the Left and the Liberal have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, fantasizing female Islamists as if they were latter day Rosa Parks, notwithstanding the fact the hijabis choose to sit at the back of the bus and condemn those who seek the front row.

Canadians must wake up and stop tippy toeing in cowardice around those who wish to bring the niqab to Canada.

While it should be designated cruel and unusual punishment – both against Canada and good taste – to reprint any of her essay, it’s important you see how silly this all is, so bear with me.

She alleges Harper “spent a lifetime plotting to transform Canada into a nastier version of Texas.” That “he really wants a government that’s too small to help its citizens.” She describes his caucus as “obedient, dark-suited, rural, punitive, women-despising MPs.”

She says Harper described the NDP as “a kind of proof that the devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.” He did say that, but most Canadian political observers know it was said as a joke.

Then she claims John Baird was “put in charge of the budget.” No he wasn’t.

It’s fair to assume the only reason this essay made it to print as is, is that the editors at Harper’s Magazine don’t know Canadian politics enough to challenge their writer to substantiate her outlandish claims. Usually their essays – while still unapologetically leftist – are far better argued.

Now, normally a columnist shouldn't waste too much time or space complaining about another columnist at a competing publication. But this is more than that.

At first glance, it appears these three misanthropes are just speaking extremely ill of Stephen Harper and his policies. That’s fair game in partisan politics.

Fascinating analysis of Kissinger's early ideas and motivations by his biographer Niall Ferguson. I was fortunate enough to be at the Munk debate on China a few years ago where the two debated against each other.

Surely no statesman in modern times, and certainly no American secretary of state, has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.

At the height of his fame, Kissinger appeared as a cartoon “Super K” on the cover of Newsweek, complete with tights and cape. Time magazine called him “the world’s indispensable man.” In 1974, his approval rating, according to the regular Harris survey, was an astounding 85%.

Since then, however, heaping opprobrium on Kissinger has become a thriving industry. The Nation magazine once caricatured him under a stars-and-stripes bedcover, gleefully ravishing a naked female whose head was the globe. The late Christopher Hitchens went further, accusing him of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Protest groups like Code Pink never tire of repeating such charges, most recently by disrupting a January hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee at which Kissinger was testifying.

The vitriol of the left is at first sight puzzling, especially when one considers how many of Kissinger’s initiatives were denounced by conservative critics at the time as too accommodating of America’s communist enemies. In his time as national security adviser, he played a key role in negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. It was Kissinger who, with Zhou Enlai, opened diplomatic communications between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. It was Kissinger who extricated the U.S. from the Vietnam War. And it was Kissinger who pressed for the end of white rule in Rhodesia.

Critics of every stripe tend to agree that Kissinger took foreign-policy realism too far. According to authors Marvin and Bernard Kalb, writing in the mid-1970s, he pursued “a global realpolitik that placed a higher priority on pragmatism than on morality.” His former Harvard colleague, the late Stanley Hoffmann, called Kissinger a Machiavellian who believed that “the preservation of the state…requires both ruthlessness and deceit at the expense of foreign and internal adversaries.” Even a relatively sympathetic writer,Walter Isaacson, concluded in his 2005 biography that “power-oriented realpolitik and secretive diplomatic maneuvering…were the basis of [Kissinger’s] policies.”

Friday, September 18, 2015

...Jeremy Corbyn did not become Labour leader because his friends in the Socialist Workers party organised a Leninist coup. Nor did the £3 click-activist day-trippers hand him victory. He won with the hearty and freely given support of ‘decent’ Labour members.

And yes, thank you, I know all about the feebleness of Corbyn’s opponents. But the fact remains that the Labour party has just endorsed an apologist for Putin’s imperial aggression; a man who did not just appear on the propaganda channel of Russia, which invades its neighbours and persecutes gays, but also of Iran, whose hangmen actually execute gays. Labour’s new leader sees a moral equivalence between 9/11 and the assassination of bin Laden, and associates with every variety of women-hating, queer-bashing, Jew-baiting jihadi, holocaust denier and 9/11 truther. His supporters know it, but they don’t care.

They don’t put it like that, naturally. Their first response is to cry ‘smear’. When I show that it is nothing of the sort, they say that he was ‘engaging in dialogue’, even though Corbyn only ever has a ‘dialogue’ with one side and his ‘engagement’ never involves anything so principled as robust criticism.

A few on the British left are beginning to realise what they have done. Feminists were the first to stir from their slumber. They were outraged this week when Corbyn gave all his top jobs to men. I have every sympathy. But really, what did they expect from a man who never challenged the oppression of women in Iran when he was a guest on the state propaganda channel? You cannot promote equality at home while defending subjugation abroad and it was naive to imagine that Corbyn would try.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair has been showcasing former Saskatchewan finance minister Andrew Thomson as proof that New Democrats know how to balance budgets; trouble is, the province's auditor said he didn't.

In a 2013 special report, Saskatchewan's then auditor, Bonnie Lysyk, said the province's budget was actually in deficit for nine out of the previous 10 years, despite government claims to have balanced the books each year.

That included the 2006 and 2007 budgets presided over by Thomson, who is now running for the federal NDP against Conservative finance minister Joe Oliver in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. The Liberals are fielding Marco Mendicino in the riding after a high-profile nomination race against floor-crosser Eve Adams.

Lysyk's report has resurfaced as New Democrats and Liberals snipe at one another over the quality of economic advice their respective leaders are receiving in preparation for tonight's debate on economic issues.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

If you don't know who Naomi Klein is, imagine if Noam Chomsky were twenty-five years younger, had a sex change and significant brain damage, and that pretty much completes the picture.

Yesterday Klein and a collection of imbeciles from the NDP released what they call their Leap Manifesto. Named after Mao Ze Dong's Great Leap Forward, a communist social engineering project which exterminated 50 million innocent people, the manifesto completely undermined NDP leader Tom Mulcair's pretense of being capable of responsible stewardship of Canada's economy.

Dubbed by critics, The Tommunist Manifesto, it was a call for an upheaval of capitalism and massive taxes so that the working classes would not actually have to work, but could be given a guaranteed base income. How that will be paid for when the people who get taxed to death to permanently subsidize the non-working classes decide to abandon Canada for safer environs is anyone's guess. Ironically, a number of the signatories to The Tommunist Manifesto are idiot celebrity millionaire expats like Ellen Page, Pam Anderson and Donald Sutherland, who has lived and paid taxes outside Canada for so long, he's lost his Canadian voting privileges.

Mulcair would bring Greece's economy to Canada if elected. His caucus would welcome that development, as his senior shadow cabinet member Niki Ashton, who wanted Greece to reject its austerity plans, recently reminded Canadians. A Mulcair government would be the economic death of Canada. But what does that matter to the preening celebrity morons who signed The Tommunist Manifesto but won't be affected by it? They abandoned Canada long ago.

Of course if he really believes this, he'd revise the Title IX rules that have been used to create and encourage the travesties he's now criticizing.

"...I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn..."

OTTAWA -- Just as Tom Mulcair attempts to convince Canadians that the NDP is a safe, moderate choice in the Oct. 19 election, some of his party's highest profile supporters are issuing a manifesto calling for a radical restructuring of the country's economy.

The "leap manifesto," signed by more than 100 actors, musicians, labour unions, aboriginal leaders, environmentalists and other activists, aims to pressure the next federal government to wean Canada entirely off fossil fuels in as little as 20 years and, in the process, upend the capitalist system on which the economy is based.

...67-year-old Jerry Casale of Devo (Yes, the “Whip It” band) got married to his 26-year-old piece Krista Napp on Friday, which was 9/11, and somebody thought it would be hilarious to do a 9/11 theme at his reception. Imagine if they got married on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. TMZ posted pictures from that mess. Jerry and his young piece of a wife had a World Trade Center wedding cake, they gave out box cutters as party favors and their place settings looked like this:

The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo has satirised the imaged of drowned Syrian migrant child Aylan Kurdi, to mock Christian Europe and its apparent obsession with consumerism in the face of the migrant crisis. But many seem to have got the wrong end of the sardonic stick, thinking that the cartoon was a critique of the young boy and his family.

Shallow thinking has caused the politically correct media and Muslim interest groups are very offended.

The words, “So close to his goal…” are written above the first image. In the background, a McDonalds Happy Meal signboard reads: “Two children’s menus for the price of one.”

A separate cartoon from the same edition is titled: “The Proof that Europe is Christian.” It features an image of Jesus walking on the Mediterranean beside Aylan’s legs protruding from the water. Below, it says: “Christians walk on water… Muslim kids sink.”

An exclusive interview of Suzuki by my buddy Andrew Lawton for AM 980 in London, Ontario. Suzuki makes some great points, unless you find out the facts behind what he says, and then it becomes clear he really doesn't know what he's talking about. The interview gets pretty (man-made) heated at the end:

Sunday, September 13, 2015

...People have gone pretty far over the cliff when they can believe that an update to modern technology constitutes a war on science. The truth of the matter was less far-fetched and more squalid. Demand for materials-on-paper from the Lethbridge library had plunged by more than 80 percent over recent years. Digitization of the library threatened public-sector jobs. What was at issue here was not know-nothingism. It was unionized Luddism...

Only a few days ago, a kid was stabbed at my son's high school. He ended up in critical condition and my son was locked in a classroom without air conditioning on a sweltering afternoon the week of Labour Day. Whether of not kids are being actually harmed isn't the kind of safety for students Kathleen Wynne cares about. Because she doesn't care about your kids beyond conditioning them to think the way she wants them to think.

The Premier of Ontario is a hypocrite:

...(Kathleen) Wynne said her new sex-ed curriculum is all about keeping children safe in school and society and nothing will stop her from implementing it...

...On her sex-ed curriculum, she paints her adversaries as being motivated by evil intentions and herself as being on the side of the angels...

...Now let’s compare that to Wynne’s reaction to a report on actual school violence which, unlike graffiti, really endangered the safety of Toronto students back when she was education minister.

It found widespread problems such as a “culture of fear and silence” with regard to reporting and addressing school violence throughout the system, starting at the top.

It said there were significant numbers of guns, knives and other weapons in certain schools and that sexual assaults were a serious problem.

Teachers trying to control violent, bullying students and trespassers complained to the task force about a lack of support from school administrators, superintendents and trustees, some of whom interfered in disciplinary cases, violated confidentiality and undermined attempts to deal with violent students.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

WASHINGTON — President Obama, in advance of his victory in Congress on Thursday on the Iran nuclear deal, focused on centrifuge numbers, uranium stockpiles and the breakout time to build a bomb. But now, as the agreement is carried out, he will face a new battle over how stringently to impose economic sanctions on Iran.

To reward Iran for imposing constraints on its nuclear program, the United States agreed to lift many of the crippling sanctions that have blocked the country’s integration into the world economy. But to win over wary Democrats, Mr. Obama promised that he would maintain — and perhaps even increase — sanctions to punish Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses and other “destabilizing activities in the region.”

Many lawmakers have indicated they would like to go further, and they are considering legislative proposals that include renewing the current sanctions against foreign companies that invest in Iran’s energy industry. Mr. Obama would waive them as long as Iran complied with the nuclear accord, but these sets of actions would be a signal that Iran is not to be trusted and that sanctions could be restored rapidly.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Just 36 per cent of Canadians think the federal government should allow more refugees from Syria, according to polling by EKOS Research.

“There is a very large number of Canadians that are saying we have to be very careful about who we bring into this country,” says Kyle Matthews, senior deputy director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University.

Speaking of not-so-well integrated Muslims, convicted terrorist Omar Khadr, currently out on bail, thinks he should be able to have his ankle bracelet monitoring device removed because it interferes with his ability to play soccer. No, I'm not making that up as a funny.

...The concern about Jeremy Corbyn is not that he indulges in antisemitism himself. It is that he indulges the antisemitism of others unless they come wearing a uniform and speaking German. When he is faced with antisemitic anti-Zionism, he overlooks the antisemitism. For example, he defended the antisemitic Palestinian Islamist Raed Saleh, even though Saleh's vile Jew-hatred was a matter of public record (hell, a matter of court records, come to that).Today is springtime for left-wing antisemitic anti-Zionism. We have a left-wing poet, Tom Paulin, who compares the IDF to the SS; a left-wing Church of England vicar, Stephen Sizer, who links to an article saying the Jews did 9/11, and then says, anyway, prove that they didn't; a left-wing comedian, Alexei Sayle, who jokes that Israel is the Jimmy Saville of the nations; a left-leaning peer, Jenny Tonge, who demands an enquiry into whether the rescue mission sent by Israel to Haiti had a secret agenda of harvesting organs for Jews in Israel. And so on.The left got into this mess because it wanted to dissolve Jewish peoplehood in the solvent of progressive universalism. We thought the proletariat would make a revolution that would solve "the Jewish question" once and for all...

The Olympics will be another occasion when narcissistic politicians use hundreds of millions of your dollars to play the big shot on the world stage, while plunging the city into more of a massive debt load.

Why are John Tory and Kathleen Wynne are so secretive about whether they're going to make an Olympic bid? I'll start trusting Tory a little more when he keeps his promise to privatitze garbage pick-up east of Yonge Street. He made a big deal about doing that during the election. It's almost a year later and still nothing.

Say what you will about Rob Ford, but as a politician, you knew if he said he was going to do something, he'd at least give it his best shot at doing it. I'll be happy to take the crack and odd behavior over an untrustworthy jellyfish.

Former mayor Rob Ford has added his voice to the growing opposition against a potential Toronto Olympic bid, telling CP24 that the city’s simply doesn’t have the money to stage the multi-sport games.

Canada's central bank has maintained its key lending rate at 0.5 per cent as low oil prices kept a lid on inflation.The fallout of last year's plunge in oil prices, which led to a contraction in the first half of the year, the Bank of Canada said on Wednesday, continues to be felt in the Canadian resource sector 'with some spillover to the rest of the economy'.'These adjustments are complex and are expected to take considerable time,' it added.Canadian consumer spending and a 'firm recovery' in the neighbouring United States, 'with particular strength in the sectors of the US economy that are important for Canadian exports', have bolstered the local economy...

...Amid the refurbished boardwalk and laughter of children, it's easy to forget that Coney Island was once a place where tourists did not venture. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, street gangs dominated this neighborhood. They ran rampant through the area's neglected housing projects, tearing along Surf and Neptune avenues toward West 8th Street. Those gangs, or gangs like them, and that incarnation of Coney Island would form the backbone of author Sol Yurick's 1965 debut novel, The Warriors, about the young members of a street gang. More than a decade after the novel's publication it would be optioned and, eventually, turned into a major motion picture of the same name.

Shot almost entirely on location in the streets, trains, and subway stations of New York, the film was released with great fanfare — and controversy — and, to this day, maintains a rabid fan base around the world. In the last decade it has enjoyed a new relevance as an oft-referenced pop-cultural touchstone with the release of various comic books, video games, and modernized action figures, thrilling old fans while picking up new ones along the way. Because while The Warriors is in many ways a fantastical journey — more spaghetti western than cinéma vérité — it nonetheless portrayed something true about Coney Island, the five boroughs, and America at that time. In the Seventies, when Coney Island's first low-income housing complex, Carey Gardens, was built, there were gangs that ruled nearly every neighborhood in New York. They were born out of the street crews and underserved ghettos of the Fifties and Sixties. During the crack epidemic of the Eighties, the gang situation would go from bad to worse, but the five boroughs were already reaching record highs in homicide rates. By the time The Warriors was in production in the summer of 1978, an atmosphere of danger hung menacingly over the city....